On the subject of The Matrix, I don't have a problem with a paper that argues that it fails to do something, but it seems to me that such an argument should demonstrate how and when the film assumed the responsibility to have done that thing to begin with. When I say that we ought to critique the movie that they made, not the one they failed to make, I don't mean that we're not allowed to force them to take responsibility for the content.
For example, a movie might implicitly promise to do something, by virtue of genre, and then not do so, an action movie that 'fails' to have a big, violent climax. It might evoke a certain philosophical perspective and never follow up on it, as The Matrix does with Baudrillard, or get it utterly wrong, as Fritz Lang's Metropolis does with Marxism (although we could also argue that Metropolis is quite specifically an argument against Marxism, but that's a side issue).
This is a thought in process, so forgive me for its roughness, but it seems to me that there we're talking about two different critical operations, the presence critique versus the absence critique (I'm entirely making up these terms, by the way).
In the presence critique, we might say (random example) that The Matrix aligns one clothing aesthetic (goth-like club wear) with rebellion and individualism (in the film, it's labelled 'good'), and another (the IBM uniform: black suit + white shirt) with conformity and institutional power ('bad'). That, to me, is an evaluation of something the movie does, and we can site evidence to back up the claim.
In the absence critique, we might say the film fails to deconstruct the interplay of fashion and morality. In so doing, we'd probably end up making several of the same points, what clothing is aligned with what social values, as above, but we'd be doing so with the running assumption that the film ought to have deconstructed that intersection of aesthetics and ethics.
My response to that absence critique is: at what point did that film in any way claim it would deconstruct its aesthetic/ethical representation? How can we reasonably expect it to have done so? In a more methodological sense, how can we claim to perceive an absence without the promise of a presence?
If I were to analyze the methodology of the absence critique, I'd say that the critic takes a theoretical position (and therefore a political and moral one), but then expects the art she encounters to conform to that theoretical position. She could perceive a 'lack' or a 'failure' only if she were to pin a set of expectations onto the
art, which seems unreasonable to me. It's the equivalent of going to a Merchant Ivory period piece set in the Edwardian period and complaining about the lack of a kung fu battle at the end. The movie never implied it would have one, therefore logically it can't 'lack' one.
Zizeck does the same thing when claims that the Zionites ought not to die in reality when they die in the matrix. He's imposing his own, essentially made up, expectations onto the film even though it explicitly states and clearly demonstrates that they simply do. That fact is an element of the plot. Claiming that it ought not to be one is an empty complaint. Instead, tell me what it means that it's present.
That, and he gets the chronology totally wrong at the end of the movie. How you could possibly miss that Neo doesn't become The One until after Smith shoots him is beyond me. The point isn't that I think he's done some horrible disservice to the film, but that screwing up the order of events is a sign of, if you'll pardon me, bad scholarship.
It's also very common amongst critics who attempt to dabble in sci-fi and fantasy. If I had to guess, I'd say that they have so little respect for the primary material that getting the details wrong just doesn't bother them. It doesn't deserve that kind of close attention. Zizeck specifically says that "the ideal audience member [is] an
idiot." He's a tourist at best; someone who's just arrived in a new country and has decided that he understands it better than the locals. At worst, he's slumming it, checking out what these poor 'idiotic' sci-fi people think they're up to, and then telling them what they're 'really' up to.